Talk by Taylor Carman: "Heidegger, Foucault, and la pensée classique"

Every semester, the Philosophy Department hosts three talks by philosophers from outside F&M. This is the third for Fall 2025. Our speaker this time is Taylor Carman, Professor of Philosophy at Bernard College.

Generally, though with a few exceptions, notably Viennese music and Newtonian mechanics, the word “Classical” in English refers not to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but to antiquity. Likewise, for Heidegger, as for most philosophy professors, the “modern” age began with Descartes, not Kant, and the salient Revolution was the Scientific, not the Industrial. This much is just nomenclature, but it marks a difference between Heidegger’s critique of (what philosophers call) “early modern” thought and Foucault’s archaeology of la pensée classique that is not merely terminological. My primary aim in this paper is to say what that difference is and what difference it makes. My other aim is to show that, notwithstanding the difference, Foucault’s description of Classical thought, which he also calls the Classical episteme, bears a striking resemblance to Heidegger’s account of the metaphysics of the “world picture” (Weltbild), by which he meant the understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) that underlies not just modern science but the entire procedure and organization of modern knowledge as well as the conception we have of ourselves as thinking subjects over against a world of objective representation.

The event consists of a lecture followed by Q&A.

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